![The Story of Lilly Dawson [annotated]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51WMvMlgPPL._SY445_SX342_.jpg)
The story begins with eight-year-old Lilly Dawson living (if it could be called living) in an isolated inn off the coast of England. She's the maid of all work to her relatives, the Littenhaus family. No one knows who these Littenhaus people are, or where they came from. The old father is an invalid. The eldest brother is a surly and repellant. The sisters dress above their station, and visit no one but their dressmaker. So inhospitable is The Black Huntsman inn that guests are few and far between – and usually weirdly unsavory.
In this sinister setting little Lilly does her chores like an automaton, her only friend the old man who depends on her for his care. Little does she realize that she's the captive of a family of smugglers.
Lilly's awakening from her sub-human existence, and her dramatic escape from the inn, are purely accidental. Obedience has been drilled into her. She is bereft of initiative. Yet Lily does escape, and the story revolves around her adventures. The coincidence-ridden plot presents us with bloody murders, piracy, shipwreck, kidnapping, madness, betrayal, love, passion and even a ghostly apparition. This was the popular fare of the sensation novel, and nineteenth-century readers lapped it up. So do I, frankly.
Lily has several careers before she's finished with the horrors that beset her -- roadside beggar, nursemaid, seamstress, housemaid.... She encounters both cruelty and kindness along the way, but the many kindnesses slowly heal her stultified mind and broken spirit.
The author does have a tendency to fall into diatribes against social injustice and the oppression of women -- but the story is so fast-paced otherwise that a few digressions can be forgiven. Besides, they highlight the issues that occupied the minds of the contemporary intelligentsia. Catherine Crowe was considered quite advanced in her ideas.
Crowe was admired for her psychological realism, and her characters live and breathe. She's a very good writer, despite her relentless delivery of thrills and chills. In her day Crowe was as famous as Dickens or Thackeray, and she hobnobbed with the literary elite. The excellent introduction to this Victorian Secrets edition places Catherine Crowe in context and tells about a sensational episode in her personal life.
I stayed up late last night finishing the riveting Story of Lilly Dawson. It's a real treat for fans of Victorian literature. I hope the publisher will offer us more by this accomplished sensation novelist.
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